


Lost Time Is Never Found Again

by creatureofhobbit



Category: Manifest (TV 2018)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-03
Updated: 2020-01-03
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:02:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22106008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/creatureofhobbit/pseuds/creatureofhobbit
Summary: Michaela tries to deal with the knowledge of the prediction of her death date.
Kudos: 10
Collections: The 100 Multifandom Challenge





	Lost Time Is Never Found Again

She can still remember the time at the hospital, Jared, Lourdes and Ben at her side, when Jared had just broken it to her that Evie hadn’t survived the accident. Beverly had walked into her room, pointed a finger at Michaela, and ignoring Lourdes’s attempts to steer her away, had hissed at her “It should have been you.”

Well, Beverly, you’ll soon get your wish.

Of course, it would mean nothing to her now when she did get that wish. Last time Beverly had seen Michaela, she had started yelling at her about Evie, but the time before that, she’d started talking about a PTA function she was attending with Michaela’s mother and asking about the girl Ben was dating when he was sixteen. Time meant nothing to Beverly any more. But since the day she got off the plane to find out she had landed five years in the future, it had never meant more to Michaela.

Five years. June 2, 2024. If Ben, Cal and Olive were right, and Michaela had no reason to think they weren’t, that was going to be the day she would die, along with her brother and nephew. That was when Beverly would get her wish, and Michaela couldn’t argue with her, deep down. It should have been her. Why should she feel any sense of unfairness at the idea that she was only to have five more years of her life left to her, when Evie had been deprived of even that? And yet there was another part of her that still thought of all the things she would never get to do; she still felt guilty sometimes, for example, about the posthumous promotion she had received, and in her former life she had always wanted to move further up the ranks, and yet now she feels almost as if any promotion for her would be taking away an opportunity for someone who had an actual future in the department.

Years ago, Michaela, Evie and Lourdes had had a drunken conversation where Lourdes had asked them both what they would do if any of them knew they only had a certain time to live. From what she could remember, there had been a lot of joke suggestions from them all such as Evie’s joke about asking out Brad Pitt, and Lourdes’s suggestion of skinny dipping, but there had been some discussions about travelling to countries they had never visited before, seeing the Northern Lights. Michaela wishes she could remember all the suggestions she had actually made, because now she might plan on actually doing some of them. The one that she can remember is Evie joking that Michaela should choose that opportunity to propose to the guy she’d been dating at the time. Michaela had just laughed that one off (she hadn’t yet told Evie and Lourdes that she was thinking of ending that particular relationship; the conversation had in fact prompted her to make that decision sooner rather than later), but she had thought that if she was in a relationship with someone else she was certain about, maybe she would have used that opportunity to propose.

Now, faced with Jared having left Lourdes for her, having just thrown away his marriage for a relationship that had no possible long term future, Michaela wanted to go back to her twenty one year old self and shake her and ask her what she was thinking. True, Michaela hadn’t initiated Jared leaving Lourdes, and she hadn’t known about her death date at the time, but Jared should never have let Lourdes leave him without trying to work on their marriage. If Michaela had landed in 2013 as planned, she would have accepted his proposal, they would most likely have been married by now, maybe even have had kids. But she hadn’t, and now he and Lourdes had married. With Lourdes, Jared could have had the chance of a future. Instead, he’d made the wrong choice, and now faced a potential future with neither of them. Maybe it didn’t have to be too late for them. Maybe Michaela could try and go after Lourdes, talk to Jared, see if she could help them realise they could have a future together. But if Jared was sure that Lourdes wasn’t right for him, maybe that would also be the wrong choice.

Michaela wonders how Olive is handling it as stoically as she is. The kid’s only just got used to having her dad and her brother back after five years of not knowing what had happened to them; now she’s facing the prospect of losing them all over again, this time with no prospect of them coming back, and knowing exactly when it’s going to happen. Cal had said to her once that before he ever got on the flight, he hadn’t told his parents or Olive, but even as Ben was searching for all these possible treatments, he was already reconciling himself to the possibility that he wouldn’t make it. Now he’s saying that he already accepted the idea in his head, that he’d just been worried about how his family would react and that was why he would initially talk only to Zeke.

Ben has been a bit up and down; one minute he’s determined to believe there’s some way of changing the death date, next minute he’s telling Grace she should consider trying to make things work with Danny again, that maybe she can have a future with him. Grace has tried to argue, saying she’d made her choice, she wanted to make things work with Ben, and even if that’s only five years, she wants those five years with him as a family. She reminds him of how he was the one always trying to find some miracle cure for Cal before they ever went to Jamaica, and how he shouldn’t lose hope now; at one point, Grace and Olive had thought they were never going to see Ben and Cal again and yet now they had been returned to them; maybe there would be some other miracle that would keep them together.

He’s finally agreed, with a little help from Michaela and Saanvi, not to give up hope, that he will keep working with them to try and find some solution, or other explanation, to give themselves a future. To give themselves more time.


End file.
